"A patriotic sound that incorperates bold stripped down blues with a voice reminiscent of Pete Yorn and a broken America"

- HM Magazine



The title says it all for Charlotte, NC rock'n'roller John Mark McMillan's sophomore effort The Song Inside the Sounds of Breaking Down. John Mark recently sat down with Braille's Thomas Torrey for an in-depth discussion on the inspirations and personal nature of the record.

The songs came out of the tragic death of McMillan's best friend, just months after John Mark's debut record Hope Anthology Vol. 1 hit stores. The grief that followed, and the subsequent rise from under it, is what bore the fruit for John Mark's newest anthology. "The album is about what happens when you fall apart," McMillan said. "I don't think there is any way of avoiding painful experiences as a human. Those painful experiences can either make us angry and bitter and cynical, or they can break us and change us and we can become more than what we were even before."

When asked about the role of faith in his music, McMillan responded, "Christianity has to have a place in my art because it's who I am. If it didn't then I'd come across as pretentious. People can see through facades easily." But he adds, "The gospel has been abused so often that people hear the name of Jesus and they think of a used car salesman. We've got to change that. There are so many completely broken and devasted people in the world. I think we ignore this as artists and as Christians. I didnt want to do that. I wanted to put something out there that people could relate to. That's what the album's all about, the song that comes out of falling apart."

- Thomas Torrey, WSLC Radio



"This album deals with what happens when you fall apart" -John Mark McMillan

You get the sense, when listening to an album by John Mark McMillan, that there is another America out there. It's an America more real than the one you're used to: the one of endless car dealerships, sprawled out suburbia, and shoeshine religion. This is not that America. This is the America that exists, breathing and living, outside the realm of blue state and red state allegiance. This is the America built on the backs of the bruised and the broken, the America of under-produced country music and fuzzed out rock and roll and old time gospel.

Though McMillan's most recent release, The Song inside the Sounds of the Breaking Down, may open up with the deceptively Anglo-centric "London town", the sound was most definitely born in the U.S.A. From the banjos and tube crunch of "Breaking Down" to the careening, slightly drunken "Next to You Now", McMillan and company have crafted an album that sonically stretches from sea to shining sea, subtly pulling from influences as disparate as Springsteen, Whiskeytown, and Death Cab for Cutie.

Lyrically, John Mark McMillan thinks like a poet. Lines like "I've been walking in my sleep/digging trenches in the pavement with the soles of my feet" and "I dreamed I kissed your feet/between the cigarette butts on the side of fourteenth street" wind their way through the tunes like Carolina copperheads. The result is a thread that binds all of McMillan's music together: being broke down. Whether it's the death of a friend or the distance of a lover, the ghost that haunts John Mark's soul seems to brood on the back of his brokenness. And really, from the blues to Bob Dylan, what could be more American than that?

-Eric Hurtgen, Relevant Magazine

John Mark's newest album: "The Song Inside the Sounds of the Breaking Down" is available now on ITUNES , CD BABY , RHAPSODY, BRAILLE RECORDS, and John Mark's WEB SITE


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